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Screen Sharing with Mac OS X and GNU/Linux

By aleix

Today, I discovered how to share my Mac OS X (Leopard) screen with another non-Mac OS X computer. Not a big deal, as it is almost automatic, but I’m posting it here as I did a search and I didn’t find how to do it.

What you need to do in your Mac OS X box is enabling the Screen Sharing service from the Sharing options in the System Preferences.

preferences1_small.png

Before establishing the connection you need to setup a password. This is done in the “Computer Settings…” button, just like this:

preferences2_small.png

Do not avoid the password step, if you do it the connection will not be established.

Finally, you only need a VNC client in your GNU/Linux box. Not all the clients work, one that it does is the TightVNC viewer. In Debian, you can just type:

apt-get install xtightvncviewer

Once installed, you only need to run it and supply the IP address of your Mac OS X box and the password you configured.

screensharing_small.png

Enjoy it!

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This entry was posted on December 12, 2007 at 11:24 am and is filed under GNU/Linux, Mac OS X. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

5 Responses to “Screen Sharing with Mac OS X and GNU/Linux”

  1. Matt Says:
    August 21, 2008 at 11:48 pm | Reply

    This doesn’t seem to work with OSX 10.5. I get this message, using TightVnc 1.3.9:

    $ ./vncviewer
    Connected to RFB server, using protocol version 3.8
    Server did not offer supported security type

  2. savaged Says:
    September 5, 2008 at 12:35 am | Reply

    Great article, thanks for posting your findings. I got this working first time on Ubuntu Hardy Heron and Mac Leopard, following the above. Thanks again.

  3. Miquel Says:
    October 15, 2008 at 1:25 am | Reply

    Matt… there is a way to solve that.

    I had the same problem trying to use tightvnc on my ubuntu’s box.

    Use OSXVnc (you can find it here) http://sourceforge.net/projects/osxvnc/ it works as a vnc server in a different port (you can define it, starting at 5901) and you’re not going to have any issues, if you try to connect to it using different OSes.

    Kind regards.

    Miquel

  4. grant Says:
    October 28, 2008 at 2:01 pm | Reply

    thanks for this, gonna set it up now

  5. GerdH Says:
    December 20, 2008 at 10:35 pm | Reply

    Thanks for posting this! Once I set “VNC viewers may control screen with password”, I can use both UltraVNC and TightVNC to connect to Leopard from a Windows XP machine.

    Without this setting:

    TightVNC returned “Server did not offer supported security type”
    UltraVNC returned “Incompatible Versions”
    ____
    Gerd

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